Martin House fans already know the brewery’s staples: Imperial Texan, Day Break, River House Saison and Pretzel Stout.

But the recipes in Cody Martin’s head never stop brewing. At the end of a recent visit to Martin House, he pulled a full pitcher of something dark, sweet-smelling and strange. Its name, then, is appropriate: Kafkaesque.

It’s an imperial smoked black rye oaked raspberry IPA — and if you braved the frigid drizzle last weekend at the Untapped Festival in Fort Worth, maybe you were lucky enough to get a taste of the test batch. (Martin says it could turn into a full-scale batch at some point.)

His beers all germinate differently, but in this case, the adjective “Kafkaesque” actually inspired the ingredients.

“The word appealed to me,” he says. “The first time I saw that word was an episode title of Breaking Bad. I knew it had to do with The Metamorphosis and all that, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. I like the definition on Wiktionary, which is: ‘Marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity.’

“To me it was the perfect name for a complex beer. So I was trying to think of something incredibly complex to do with it. And [Martin House co-founder] Adam [Myers] almost jokingly said: ‘We ought to do a beer with all the cool guy stuff’ — that’s what we call all the beers that aren’t ours that are good. We call ’em ‘cool guy’ beers. So what if you put all the trendy beer stuff into one beer?”

Plus, he says, it is “menacingly complex.”

“I have many, many recipes that float around in my head that I haven’t gotten to make yet,” Martin says. “I wish I had more time to make test batches. We average maybe two a month right now.”

Here’s another unreleased Cody creation that actually predates the brewery, and intrigues us to no end: The working title is Salsa Verde, inspired by the ingredients in the Tex-Mex condiment. It’s a blonde ale — a pepper beer, made with jalapeños and poblanos, along with tomatillo, cilantro and lime peel.

“It’s a good beer,” Martin says. “We’ll probably bring it to full-scale [production] one of these days.”

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